• Silicon Valley founders still want total control of their start-ups.

Having trouble trying to follow Trump’s trade policies?

A word of advice: Dates are your friend.

The Trump administration on Tuesday said it was moving ahead with $50 billion of tariffs on Chinese products. The announcement came just days after members of the administration said the tariffs, first threatened in April, would be put on hold while China and the United States held talks. The United States and China had appeared to be moving closer to resolving their differences in other ways. China had agreed to buy a certain extra amount of United States goods and services, while the U.S. had softened its stance toward ZTE, the Chinese electronics firm that faltered after it got hit with penalties imposed by the U.S. Commerce Department.

So why would the Trump administration bring back the threat of tariffs now? One reason may be to assuage lawmakers who do not favor making concessions on ZTE to China. As Shawn Donnan of the FT wrote:

It may also be that members of the administration who favor taking a harder line against China have in recent days regained some influence in the White House. President Trump took a step last week that could lead to tariffs on autos, and the administration’s metals tariffs are still set to hit the European Union on June 1.

Another possible reason for re-introducing the $50 billion of tariffs: China is not giving as much ground as the Trump administration wants on a wide range of trade issues. By rolling out the threat again, the U.S. may hope to extract more concessions in negotiations before they wrap up.

Whatever the causes, the administration’s tariffs announcement at least contained a detail that will help outsiders to better gauge Mr. Trump’s true appetite for a trade war. It said the final list of imports from China covered by the tariffs would be announced on June 15, adding that the tariffs would be imposed “shortly thereafter.”

This appears to be the first time the administration has set itself some sort of deadline for imposing the tariffs against China.

Imagine it is the second half of June and China has not agreed to significant, concrete concessions. Mr. Trump could choose to impose the tariffs, an unmistakably hostile act that would mark the beginnings of a trade war with China, which has vowed to retaliate with its own tariffs.

Of course, Mr. Trump could keep extending the deadline, since he has the leeway to push it out to early next year. But every time he does that, the tariffs threat loses potency. In that scenario, a deal in which not much changes would be more likely than an outright victory for the United States or a full-blown trade war.

So far, the public has not been able to tell what the Trump administration really wants. In two weeks, that may be possible.

— Peter Eavis

The Justice Dept. finally approves the Bayer-Monsanto deal

The $66 billion union of the two can move forward, after the department imposed what it called the biggest-ever divestiture of assets for a merger approval.

Bayer will have to sell $9 billion worth of assets to win the Justice Department’s approval, the regulator said on Tuesday. Among them are businesses that compete with Monsanto today, including seeds for cotton and soybean and its Liberty herbicide unit, which competes with Monsanto’s Roundup. Bayer will also have to sell some research projects.

What’s notable about the announcements is that they fall in line with the antitrust philosophy of Makan Delrahim, the department’s antitrust chief. They emphasize “structural” changes to the company — as in sales of businesses — rather than “behavioral” remedies, in which companies agree to change their conduct.

To Mr. Delrahim’s mind, the behavioral approach, which was used in Comcast’s takeover of NBCUniversal, makes the Justice Department an ongoing regulator. That’s something that he has said the department would not do.

What Mr. Delrahim said of Tuesday’s agreement:

“This comprehensive structural solution to significant horizontal and vertical competition concerns—the largest merger divestiture ever required by the United States—preserves competition in the sale of these critical agricultural products and protects American farmers and consumers,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division. “We commend the parties for working with the Antitrust Division to resolve our concerns on behalf of American consumers.”

— Michael de la Merced

What the investor thinks can make the E.U. better

In an opinion piece written for Project Syndicate, the billionaire says that “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong” for Europe. His solution? The E.U. should reinvent itself, focusing on the biggest challenges that he thinks it faces, from immigration, austerity, and nations leaving the political bloc.

His suggested fix for the refugee crisis: no defined quotas for the numbers of immigrants that nations should accept, and an E.U.-led “Marshall Plan for Africa” that would help African governments to provide education and employment for citizens so as to reduce emigration.

But that runs counter to the E.U.’s current austerity drive, so Mr. Soros also suggests a way to help it spend more:

Without going into the details, I want to point out that the proposal contains an ingenious device, a special-purpose vehicle, that would enable the E.U. to tap financial markets at a very advantageous rate without incurring a direct obligation for itself or for its member states; it also offers considerable accounting benefits. Moreover, although it is an innovative idea, it has already been used successfully in other contexts, namely general-revenue municipal bonds in the US and so-called surge funding to combat infectious diseases.

Finally, to keep nations like Britain from leaving the E.U., Soros argues that the bloc must restyle itself as a club that it’s attractive to belong to:

Such a Europe would differ from the current arrangements in two key respects. First, it would clearly distinguish between the EU and the eurozone. Second, it would recognize that the euro has many unsolved problems, which must not be allowed to destroy the European project.

All this, Mr. Soros argues, could create a union where countries are both able to assert their sovereignty while also collaborating on joint goals more effectively.

— Jamie Condliffe

Papua New Guinea could become a laboratory for testing Facebook regulation

The nation’s government says it may ban the social network for an entire month, and authorities around the world will be watching to see how the experiment plays out.

Sam Basil, the communication minister of Papua New Guinea, told the Post Courier newspaper that he plans to block Facebook for a period, so that the government can investigate the impact of fake accounts, pornography and fake news. He also suggested the country could experiment with creating an alternative social network with verified profiles, in order to clamp down on misleading content.

To be clear, it’s a small experiment. The population of Papua New Guinea is 8 million, and according to the United Nations, there were just 9.2 active mobile internet subscriptions per 100 inhabitants there in 2016.

But with governments in America, Europe, and the rest of the world all struggling to work out how to police the social network, the results could prove fascinating — and postnatally influential — around the world.

— Jamie Condliffe

How services, not iPhones, might get Apple to $1 trillion

Making smartphones that do more might not necessarily encourage people to buy a new one. But it could nevertheless help Apple become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

According to The Information, Apple is working on new ways to make use of the near-field communication chip — the piece of hardware that enables contactless payments — in its iPhones. As well as allowing people to buy a morning coffee, that same chip could be used for other purposes, such as verifying a person’s identity to a smart lock, or as proof of holding a ticket for a train ride.

Sounds neat. Whether these advances would convince more people to buy a new handset, though, is debatable: Sales growth of the iPhone has been erratic.

But the FT suggests that increasing proceeds from digital services enabled by such updates, and not growing sales of the devices themselves, may push Apple’s valuation above $1 trillion.

People already use their iPhone to download new apps, pay for things, subscribe to music and video services, and more — and Apple takes a small but important slice of those software purchases, payments and subscriptions (though, in the final case, only if they're bought through the app store.)

The company also makes a healthy revenue from its own services, such as Apple Music and iCloud. In total, the FT notes, Apple’s revenue from these kinds of services has doubled in four years, and Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, hopes that the company will generate $50 billion per year from them by the end of 2020.

Fast forward to the next iPhone, due out later this year. We don’t yet know what it will do, but it sounds like it could help you swipe your way into the office. It might have extra augmented reality features, which could, for instance, power new kinds of online shopping. Improved processors could help it perform more complicated artificial intelligence tasks that new apps could make use of to automate your workday tasks. Some of those advances would likely also give rise to new software features that might trickle down into current top-of-the-range iPhones.

Would those features make people head out to upgrade their phone? Perhaps. Would they allow both in-house and third-party developers to build new services that Apple can skim money off of? Certainly.

“With more than 10,000 customers and 6,000 employees, BMC is a global leader in managing digital and I.T. infrastructure with a broad portfolio of software solutions,” Herald Chen, the head of KKR’s technology, media and telecom team, and John Park, another KKR executive, said in a statement.

The context: The transaction is the latest instance of a private equity firm buying from another, rather than pursuing the takeover of a fresh target. Why is that? Investors have complained in recent years that the valuations of public companies have grown too steep, making the potential returns from acquiring them unattractive.

A mind-control start-up (really) raises $28 million

CTRL-Labs, a three-year-old start-up whose co-founders include the creator of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, has a vision of how humans could one day interact with computers: It’s making an armband that reads electrical impulses sent from users’ brains to their fingers.

“If we can recreate virtually what the hand is doing, then we’ve captured all the information that’s coming out of the muscles themselves,” Thomas Reardon, a CTRL-Labs co-founder and the Internet Explorer creator, told me in an interview. (Mr. Reardon argued that smartphones actually represented a step backward, introducing an imperfect way to control computers even as it let consumers gobble up more information.)

And the start-up has signed up some heavyweight investors. In this round: Lux Capital and Google’s GV venture arm, as well as Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

I saw a demo of the device, where Patrick Kaifosh, another CTRL-Labs co-founder played Asteroids by just thinking. And another employee sent a somewhat creepy-looking spider robot across a table without moving a finger.

But brain-computer interfaces are notoriously hard to push out of prototype. Can CTRL-Labs do it? And will developers and consumers buy in if they can?

— Michael de la Merced

Starbucks wants to serve up less bias with its lattes

The coffee shop giant will close 8,000 stores for four hours this afternoon. Why? To put employees through racial bias training. The move has drawn jeers, but Andrew argues it’s a laudable effort — if only because so few American corporations have been willing to tackle race issues.

Having spoken with senior executives at many large American companies, I found it hard to find one that has taken on the issue of race so directly, with so many employees. Other corporations have programs to improve race relations and have spent money on diversity programs, especially for those in the senior ranks. Some, including Facebook and Google, have included implicit bias training. But few, if any, have taken as sweeping an approach as Starbucks will on Tuesday.

The big question: Will anyone else follow Starbucks? Or will they take the N.F.L.’s lead and ban discussions of race at work?

Critics’ corner: The problem with problems like this in Europe is that they’re allowed to drag on, Peter Eavis argues.

Europe has a tough new data law. No, not G.D.P.R.

All eyes have been on the E.U.’s sweeping new digital privacy rules. But an even stricter set of laws known as ePrivacy — meant to come in at the same time as the General Data Protection Regulation, but slowed down by disagreements among officials — could give tech companies still larger headaches.

The legislation currently provides only one condition under which a company may use data or metadata about users’ electronic communications: obtaining consumers’ explicit and informed permission to use their information for a specific, agreed-upon purpose. The bill also requires companies to offer people the same communications services whether or not they agree to have their data collected.

Unsurprisingly, companies and trade associations are trying to derail those rules.

• Britain’s Treasury and the Bank of England are reportedly at odds over how to regulate financial services after Brexit. (FT)

• The Department of Homeland Security plans to eliminate the international entrepreneur program, which is supposed to let immigrant start-up founders stay in the U.S. for up to five years. (TechCrunch)

Congress doesn’t want to go easy on ZTE

The White House may be exploring ways to lift penalties on the Chinese telecom company, but Congress appears opposed to any such leniency. Senator Marco Rubio said on Sunday that a veto-proof supermajority of lawmakers would back a ban on ZTE and peers like Huawei.

Much rides on the fight. Beijing is reportedly finally ready to approve Qualcomm’s $44 billion acquisition of fellow chip maker NXP Semiconductors — if the ZTE ban is lifted.

Behind the scenes: Critics suggest President Trump’s desire to go easy on ZTE may contain an element of self-interest — Beijing granted Ivanka Trump several trademarks right around the time the White House announced its plans.

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Adam Neumann, WeWork’s co-founder and C.E.O.CreditPeter Prato for The New York Times

Silicon Valley founders still want total control

A new generation of tech entrepreneurs shows little sign of giving up the kinds of dual-class shares that let Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page keep a grip on their companies. Some are seizing even more power, say Rolfe Winkler and Maureen Farrell of the WSJ, giving WeWork as an example:

C.E.O. Adam Neumann, who has 65 percent voting control, is one of two members of his board’s compensation committee, along with longtime company investor Benchmark, according to WeWork’s recent bond-offering documents.

Venture capitalists have surrendered some oversight of many companies they’ve invested in just to maintain relationships with them.

The deals flyaround

• Verizon and others have reportedly asked several times whether the Redstones might sell CBS. (WSJ)

• The owner of Pret A Manger sold the British sandwich chain to JAB Holdings, the deal-hungry food conglomerate, for £1.5 billion (about $2 billion). (FT)